Codemasters' Creative Director Talks Next-Gen Racing

Codemasters Stephen Hood has shared his thoughts about racing games and the next-generation of consoles.

Speaking to IGN, the creative director of the recently announced F1 2013 explained that there was no temptation to get the upcoming game on Sony and Microsoft's next consoles as it would have resulted in a dip in quality.

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"I think there's often a push for developers to tart their games up and look slightly better for the immediate rush for the next generation," he explained. "But it costs a lot of money to put these Formula 1 games out. There’s a lot of money involved in trying to secure the rights for licenses.

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It would have been a vanilla experience just to get the tick on the next-gen box.

"Also, for us, we don’t just want to tart the game up. As far as we were thinking, there was more that we could extract from the current hardware. We knew we could get more out of the content, in terms of incorporating the Classic Mode. That was a big win; we’d been working on it for a long time and it was ready to go. For us to incorporate next-gen now meant that we’d probably pare the game back, and it would have been a vanilla experience just to get the tick on the next-gen box.

"When Formula 1 changes dramatically for the 2014 season, when all the rules change and turbos come back into the sport and it really gets things mixed up again, maybe that’s a better opportunity for us to be looking at what we can do for next-gen."

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Hood went on to share his thoughts that the next-generation of racing titles should be trying to innovate rather than simply pursue more realistic graphics, something he's not convinced games like Forza Motorspot 5 and Need for Speed: Rivals are doing.

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Do they excite me enough at the moment to necessarily move across to next-gen? No.

"I’m sure they’re going to be great experiences," he said. "Do they excite me enough at the moment to necessarily move across to next-gen? No.

"I think it looks like they are trying to be out there for obvious reasons at the start of the generation but for Formula 1 we don’t want to release that vanilla experience, we want something different. Maybe it becomes really about the driver’s perspective and you do a crazy helmet cam version. You make it 3D environmental and we do something that isn’t safe, rather than simply turn the graphics up to 11 and give you better resolutions. We’ve been there, done that; we can do more."

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In terms of the consoles themselves, He was supportive of Microsoft and the company's decision to rethink the Xbox One's features following a public backlash. He explained that Codemasters was used to similar situations and that sometimes change is necessary in order to avoid stagnation.

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Microsoft backing away from it shows at least they’re willing to listen to the gamer.

"You know, all credit to Microsoft, I think they’re trying to do something very different and I think gamers are a hard bunch to please," he admitted. "We’re quite kind of entrenched in what we’re used to and we expect things to work without really caring about the benefits that might be brought by change. We only care about today.

"You’ve got to make these leaps, but Microsoft backing away from it shows at least they’re willing to listen to the gamer so maybe it’ll be better in the long run. They’ll take a bit of pain right now, we’ll see what happens."